Simple and Short

Anyone who is involved in film making will know that an opening sequence is a vital necessity to a good film. It is what the audience first see's and hears , which they make their first judgements on. Just like the saying goes , 'You always want to make good first impression'. This applies to when your making a film, you want to grab your audience in the first minutes. There are many different and exciting ways to do this, but you want to make sure that you have a good mixture of excitement and mystery. You don't want to give too much away but you need to hood the audience so that they want to continue to watch.
A major learning curve for both me and my was our as media coursework in which we had to make an opening sequence. This meant researching opening sequences from around the world. World cinema allows you to compare different cultures and how they channel this through there films. More importantly it was interesting to see how different films would start. Some had massive explosions and other s had a more mystical and abstract feeling. An opening sequence can be shaped by its genre, but we want to step away from that an open ourselves up to a variety of different ideas.
For our film we want to create a comedy piece. After researching other comedic films such as 'White Chicks' we know we have to make the audience laugh within the first few minutes. Its like a rule which is followed thorough out comedic films. This is why we believe that our opening sequences will work. We have designed them so that the audience are laughing from very early on. This is most recognisable in our first opening sequence in which we have a balance of character development and comedy. We have the boys kick a car so that the audience know what type of characters they are , the cheeky grins on their faces is where the comedy aspect comes in. So overall , the audience get to know the characters as well as having a laugh. Even better our opening sequence is achievable , it has no high risk stunts , or impossible location, just simple shots followed by a simple idea.

Simple and Short

This past week we have been watching a collection of short films. In a couple of months we will be shooting our own shirt film so it is important that we look at other shorts. We had a DVD from the BFI of a collection of shorts , with a variety of different genres. Our short films have to be silent so we have to look for:

• Narrative
• Movement
• Editing
• Mise-en-scene
• Plot Points
• Soundtrack
  

The majority of shorts used minimum dialogue , which meant that the narrative had to be good enough to keep the audience interested. All of the shorts accomplished this with different techniques and each a different number of plot points. The number of plot points are important as you don't want to many , but you need enough to make the narrative interesting. Hard Labour was the first short we watched. I believed the narrative to be interesting , balanced and included a good twist. The main negative that the group picked up on was that there was too many plot points, and the final plot point ruined the short to an extent. Although we also thought that the idea was so simple that it worked , this along with exciting and interesting shots meant that you didn't want to take your eyes of it. The next short we watched was Stripes , a very hard hitting drama. With Stripes it was shot very well , but there wasn't enough variety with the shots. The narrative was again simple and didn't include many plot points, but this was ok as the plot points that where used let you interested. The movement of the characters as well created this contrast that helped you define who was the antagonist and protagonist. Dialogue was used but from the point of view of someone who was taking notes on narrative , it wasn't the main convention. Last of all we saw Hard Hitting, which was a comedy. I believed this to be the best out of the shorts as it used NO dialogue and was only about 5 minutes long, which was good as we could compare our ideas to it. The main convention for this short was the editing which dominated most of the film. The idea was simple , boy meets girl story with a funny twist. The variety of shots used meant you was not looking at the same thing for more then a few seconds. And more importantly the soundtrack ( fast rock music) matched the action , keeping that comedic sense.